You may remember back in May I wrote a little about Billy Joel.

It was his birthday, and I sang his praises, and I wrote about how there was a documentary coming out this summer and I was excited about it but I don’t know how exciting Billy Joel’s life is compared to other musicians.

So I knew this documentary was coming this summer, but I didn’t know exactly when. Then, last week, the morning of the David Wright Mets game, my friend texted me about it, my brother asked if I had watched it yet, and one of my cousins texted me about it.

I couldn’t believe I had missed all of the buzz that it was coming out. (In fairness to me, I don’t know that there was a ton of buzz.)

So shortly after I got back from New York I watched Part 1, and I watched Part 2 the night it came out…and finished it the next morning. (Both parts are long.)

Simply put - this is all I ever wanted as a Billy Joel fan.

It is a pretty comprehensive documentary, and it is very, very good.

It’s a very good look at early Billy Joel, which I did not know enough about. I kind of knew Billy Joel was really cool - but that wasn’t my experience being a Billy Joel fan at the time I was a Billy Joel fan.

Seeing him in the 1970s was like seeing an almost totally different guy. (Almost totally because you can see the parts of him that have been the same his whole life.)

The documentary starts with shots of the band rehearsing, probably for a Madison Square Garden gig. I loved that scene and was thinking I could have watched that for 5 hours.

Instead, it only got better and better.

There's Billy Joel music throughout the documentary, and most of it lines up with the era they’re talking about - when it’s early Billy Joel, for example, they play the ‘Cold Spring Harbor’ songs, ‘Piano Man’, and ‘Streetlife Serenade.’

There are great clips throughout - clips of him on ‘Entertainment Tonight’, music videos I didn’t know existed (‘She’s Right on Time’, which I watched after I watched the doc) - and so many great old pictures - it’s stuff I would have gone down rabbit holes on different sites or YouTube looking for during my fanatic days.

Billy Joel has told these stories for years - about how he almost didn’t put ‘Just The Way You Are’ on the album, how he met Christie Brinkley - some of it sounds made up and like good stories that are embellished. So it’s funny to hear corroboration - either from people or through video - of these stories from the other people involved - from Christie Brinkley’s perspective, in that instance, and in archived footage from the studio about ‘Just The Way You Are.’

I was a little spotty on how Billy Joel and his first wife met. Turns out she was married to his best friend. Obviously there was a falling out there…but they talk in Part 1 about how they reconnected later on…and in Part 2, how that re-connection came about was pretty cool to see.

I almost get emotional hearing people say nice things about the people I love. Back when Gary Carter died, Johnny Bench gave such a beautiful eulogy that I instantly became a Johnny Bench fan. Here it was nice to hear people like Pink, Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, Don Henley, and Jackson Browne talk about Billy Joel. And I was blown away by Nas - I had no idea how much he liked Billy Joel. Nas is now my musical Johnny Bench.

If you know Billy Joel you know that it hasn’t all been rosy. The heartbreaks, the substance abuse, the problems with management - those are all covered. And when you see how hard he had to work to put out albums early on in his career to pay off the debts incurred from some bad contracts, you almost get a sense for a contributing factor to the fact that he stopped writing songs in 1993.

And, actually, it was pretty interesting to hear when they addressed his classical music stage, how much lyrics still played a role in some of the classical music he was writing. Maybe he talked about that at the time, but I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it…he was expressing lyrics through that music.

It was wild to hear from his half-brother in the documentary - I was unaware of that part of his life.

When I wrote about David Wright and the Mets I talked a little bit about all of the Mets events I’ve been lucky to be at. I had similar thoughts about Billy Joel - from the Last Play at Shea, to ‘Movin’ Out’ on Broadway (both of which are not covered in the doc at all) to the concerts with Elton John (I saw that at least once, perhaps more) to a little series he did called ‘An Evening of Questions and Answers…and Perhaps A Few Songs’ (which I think was one of the clips where he pulled his dad on stage - I saw that at Queens College…not with his dad) to a concert at Fenway Park, I’ve been lucky to see so many great Billy Joel events. The only thing I didn’t do was see him during his Madison Square Garden residency. (I had tickets to July 2020. I tried.)

I was really mistaken when I said I wasn’t sure if Billy Joel’s life would make a good movie - it would be great. It would just be a different kind of rock and roll story. There are really amazing moments throughout the doc. His romance with Christie Brinkley is such a sweet little love story, and she always had a VHS camera going so we have such great footage of it.

There’s a great shot at the end of Billy Joel singing ‘Piano Man’ - it starts near present-day, and then cuts to 1973 in the studio - his ‘signing day’, singing it at a piano.

It’s simple but it’s kind of beautiful.

Billy Joel’s life is not simple - it has been quite complex.

But the documentary does a beautiful job of capturing it.